Staying Ahead of the Competition in the Robot Industry through Cooperation and Service Robots
The Korean government made a full-fledged start to advance the robot industry. According to the “New Government’s Industrial Policy Direction” announced in December last year, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) recently held the Intelligent Robot Industry Development Strategy Conference at the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement to discuss development plans for the robot industry.
While the world’s leading companies are competitively launching high-tech robots equipped with artificial intelligence, and the market for cooperative robots design to work with humans in industrial fields, is expected to grow rapidly from US$200 million in 2016 to JPY$ 3.24 billion in 2022. The United States and Japan invested US$22.5 million and JP¥ 29.41 billion in 2016, respectively. With the growing demand for service robots to improve the quality of life due to the increase of the elderly population and the demand for personalized service, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) expects an average annual growth rate of 10% with US$ 14.9 billion in 2020.
On the other hand, the growth of the Korean robot industry is centered on large companies manufacturing automobiles and electronic appliances. This resulted in more than three times the difference in manufacture robot production with KRW 2.67 trillion and service robot production with KRW 770.4 billion in 2016, thus posing a concern that it will be fixed as manufactureroriented.
Therefore, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) announced a plan in the conference to create leading markets and support growth centered on cooperative and service robots, which are expected to lead the global market in the future.
First, the companies equipped with smart factory construction and root companies will be provided with cooperative robots to improve the productivity of small and medium-sized manufacturers suffering from the burden with minimum wage and manpower shortage. In addition, the commercialization of service robots is planned for the five promising areas including smart home, medical, rehabilitation, disaster and safety, unmanned transportation, and agricultural robots.
In order to strengthen the innovation capability, MOTIE will concentrate its support on research and development of the three major robot parts including operation, sensing, and control, for the robot-mounted platform and the CNC control machine standard model, with a plan to specialize the research and support organizations by dividing them into three regions. This growth support measures include preparing cooperative robots safety guidelines, improving regulations that may impede the proliferation of robots, and expanding new jobs related to robot service.
Moon Seung-Wook, Director-General of MOTIE, urges the industry, academia, and research field to work together to contribute to the global competitiveness of the robot industry and to the creation of jobs for youths. The government also emphasized efforts to create tangible outcome through speedy promotion of development strategy regarding the intelligent robot industry.
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